Ub Wins Accreditation For 2 Years

The University of Bridgeport will be fully accredited by the state for two more years, ending an emotional saga for students and professors who feared the school would be forced to close.

The state Board of Governors for Higher Education Friday overcame concerns about the school's takeover by an arm of the Unification Church and voted 7-3 to allow the school to continue to award degrees.

The vote drew more than 200 supporters and opponents of the affiliation with the Professors World Peace Academy to the auditorium of Capital Community-Technical College in Hartford. When Belton Copp of Old Lyme, the sixth of 10 board members in attendance, voted yes, UB students, who had waited more than four hours for a decision, erupted with cheers. The students, who waved purple and white pompons, drowned out board Chairman William A. Bevacqua as he cast the seventh affirmative vote.

"We can now attempt to move on and return to running a university rather than being distracted," President Edwin G. Eigel Jr. told The Associated Press. "Our main goal now is to attract students."

Opponents of the $50.5 million bailout of the financially struggling university by the Professors World Peace Academy said they were heart-stricken by the decision and vowed to ask state officials or a court to reverse the decision.

The opponents view the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's church as a destructive cult that deceives and brainwashes vulnerable young people. They contend that the peace academy, which receives 90 percent of its funding from the church, is meddling in recruiting and has been given too much control over the school.

"We've just ceded control of the University of Bridgeport to the Unification Church," said Michael A. Stratton, a Bridgeport lawyer working with the Coalition of Concerned Citizens. "I don't understand why we have a board of governors for higher education if this is how they act."

The university's troubles were rooted in two decades of dwindling enrollment. Despite cutting programs and taking out $12

million in loans, the university alongside Long Island Sound was unable to pull itself out of a deep financial hole. Enrollment has improved slightly this semester, from 1,380 to about 1,500.

In November, Higher Education Commissioner Andrew G. De Rocco warned that the original agreement gave too much power to the peace academy, including the power to hire and fire the college president. After the two entities rewrote the agreement and university bylaws, De Rocco recommended accreditation be extended.

When UB board Vice Chairman Neil Albert Salonen, one of the highest ranking Americans in Moon's church, told Lowney after the vote that he would work with the board, Lowney shot back, "You'll have to. I'll be here for four more years."

Lowney called the agreement with the peace academy "de facto management by the Unification Church" and an attempt to "masquerade" a religious organization as nonsectarian.

Wasserman, a graduate of the university, said she had been leaning toward voting yes until this week when the coalition flew two Russians to Hartford from California to tell that they had been promised admission to UB by Moon recruiters in the former Soviet Union. The two are suing the church over deception and brainwashing.

"There is evidence of coercion in the off-campus recruitment of students," she said. "That is clearly unacceptable."

Those who voted yes offered few reasons. Bevacqua said later that he was ready to vote last month when others asked for a delay. He said extending accreditation through June 1995, with a review in 1994, gives state regulators several opportunities to monitor issues of finance, control and recruiting.

The supporters and opponents were cordial to each other Friday, but it was clear that words exchanged in the past few months will be difficult for many in a city already troubled by crime and fiscal hardship to forget.

"The attacks on my university have felt like McCarthyism," psychology Professor Michael Grant said. "Isn't America about tolerance ... about having faith in the judgments of others?"